New Opportunities For Data Loss Prevention

By Expert Author: Tomas Cohen

In this digital age, the threat on data security is growing every day. Fortunately, security measures are growing as well, and companies are spending more money every year to prevent these losses. While the challenges may complicate the present environment, according to experts these challenges open the doors to new solutions and opportunities.

Increased Costs
Worldwide, spending on information security measures has increased in the US to about $71.1 billion in 2014, an increase of 7.9 percent. Data Loss Prevention has grown even more jumping to 18.9 percent in 2014. This growth is unprecedented and is followed by IT security expenditures of 8.2 percent. This will result in IT security costs of $76.9 billion in 2014. This growth rate is the most significant that has ever been recorded according to Gartner Research. The influx of new threats have kept Chief Information Security Officers quite busy these days, and this activity has gone a long way to raise awareness of the potential threats to digital data.

New Solutions
Hosted applications and hosted infrastructure has become quite popular due to the lowering of overhead and the need of for on-site expertise, and this shift has created a significant change in the security sector. This is especially so given the popularity of cloud computing and the risks associated with it. Security measures and risk management strategies will be lacking for most organizations who will likely rely on outside security vendors for expertise in these areas. Hosted security options are in a good position to become the norm for smaller organizations who will not have the funding for more comprehensive forms of security.

As technology changes and new forces are introduced to put pressure on security, it will also produce new solutions as vulnerabilities are exposed. Every new breach will become a new opportunity to allow for a better understanding of security threats.

Importance of Data Loss Protection (DLP):
Preventing data loss is necessary to avoid risks to proprietary information, loss of confidentiality, and potential breach of private information. Downtime on crucial IT systems is also a constant threat, prompting companies to invest heavily in enterprise risk management and disaster recovery strategies to prevent down time and losses.

ABI predicted that the Data Loss Prevention market would reach $1.7 billion by this year, as companies are opting for more sophisticated ways to prevent data loss.

State-of-art standby databases offer Oracle users to replicate version of the original database, over any sort of data loss. Using this software, companies can minimize down time while replication processes guarantee that there will be a very limited data loss. This can help to prevent damage to a business’s reputation among stakeholders.

The overall idea behind DLP is to monitor for unauthorized attempts to access sensitive data and prevent the unauthorized breach before it data is able to leave the organization's secure perimeter.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) going cloud-based:
Gartner predicted there would be about 10 percent increase in the cloud-based services in the IT security sector by next year. While the adoption rate of cloud-based services by the small and medium scale business sector will be even greater by 2015 growing by 30 percent.

The statistics from recent polling shows 49 percent of companies have plans to move their business functions to a cloud based storage system. Moreover, 64 percent of businesses who rely heavily on digital data are expected to move their business functions into the cloud within the coming years.

Pricing for cloud-based services are becoming more competitive, putting pressure on the market, but also providing various types of growth opportunities, particularly with respect to security as organizations switch from on-site services to cloud managed products.

Author:
Tomas Cohen is a security enthusiast and analyst covering the most significant security topics and trends prevalent worldwide. He also involves in the technology related to Cloud Security, Data Loss Prevention, Box Security etc.,